The Trump Administration Wants To Whitewash History. These Black Historians and Activists are Memorializing the Sins of an Infamous Gynecologist

The racist and misogynistic origins of gynecology in the United States are well documented. But this legacy is at risk of erasure. 

In March 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order decreeing that museums stop “rewriting history” by promoting “divisive, race-centered ideology.” Trump specifically criticized the Smithsonian Institution for portraying “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

Then, in August, the president wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III, calling for a “comprehensive review” of eight of its 21 museums. NPR reported at the time that the process would include a thorough analysis of the organization’s exhibition texts, social media content, curatorial process, and exhibition planning. 

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. was on the list of facilities designated for scrutiny. One of its digital exhibits, “To Be a Woman,” features the notorious gynecologist James Marion Sims, who used enslaved Black women as guinea pigs for his medical innovations. 

Between 1845 and 1849, Sims performed nonconsensual, painful surgeries on at least three such women later identified by historians—though there are likely up to a dozen more cases.  

The Smithsonian Institution, which was closed during the 45-day federal government shutdown in October and November of 2025, has not responded to multiple requests for comment about whether it is under pressure to shutter or alter its Sims exhibits. 

But Black activists and historians are worried. In interviews with Rewire News Group, they expressed that this history, whose echoes are still visible in medicine today, must be remembered—so they’re telling it. 

Medical experimentation was common in the 19th century 

Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens documented an extensive history of racist medical experiments in her 2017 Book Medical Bondage. 

Cooper Owens told RNG she is “concerned” about the sanitation of history under the Trump administration. 

“For a political agenda to be attached to the ways we understand the past really undercuts a lot of the work historians have done,” she said.

That work includes the documentation of decades of medical abuse and exploitation that enslaved people endured under the guise of scientific advancement. 

In 1807, the importation of enslaved people into the United States was outlawed. As a result, existing enslaved people became more valuable to their enslavers, as did their offspring. This situation intensified slave owners’ existing hyperfixation on the fertility of the Black women they enslaved. 

White Southern doctors, too, became increasingly fascinated with Black women’s bodies. Countless cases of medically exploitative experiments were inflicted on enslaved Black women during the 19th century, according to Cooper Owens’ research. 

Many involved their reproductive health. During the 19th century antebellum era, Cooper Owens documented four doctors and two medical students performing ovarian surgery on a 35-year-old enslaved Black woman, after which she never menstruated again. 

A decade later, Georgia physician Dr. Raymond Harris operated on a 36-year-old enslaved mother experiencing an aggressive ovarian pregnancy, which happens when a fertilized egg grows inside the ovary. She died shortly after Harris prescribed her medication for tumor-like symptoms she manifested years before the surgery. 

Sim’s professional goal was to cure vesicovaginal fistula, an abnormal opening that forms between the bladder and the wall of the vagina. Back in the mid-19th century, Sims was designated as “the Father of Modern Gynecology,” a moniker frequently applied today. But in modern terms, he was more like a willfully unethical surgeon.  

Sims’ work reflects a broader legacy of medical exploitation, Cooper Owens’ research shows. It was common for white doctors to operate on enslaved Black women, robbing them of their humanity. 

In that sense, Owens argues, Sims’ historic prominence may be overstated. He was just one “part of a structure or a system where the medical legacy of these men continue,” she said.

Still, it’s important to document that whole history, she added, because “history is really about understanding change over time.” 

The mothers of modern gynecology

The artist and civil rights activist Michelle Browder has been documenting Sims’ abuses for over 30 years—well before there were museum exhibitions critical of him that could be whitewashed. She is known for her work memorializing the women who endured Sims’ torture.

Browder first learned of the doctor as a student at the Art Institute of Atlanta. She saw a painting by Robert Thom that depicted three white, male doctors surrounding a young Black girl on what appears to be a white-sheeted operating table. Two Black girls peer behind another white sheet, their inquisitive eyes fixated on the girl atop the table. One doctor wears a black coat while holding a speculum. 

“I saw this postcard of the painting that he created to honor James Marion Sims, and it was very popular,” Browder told RNG.  

When Browder approached her white professor about the underlying meaning of the postcard, “He told me: ‘You go figure it out.’” 

Browder felt dismissed—and activated. 

Eventually, she learned about the untold history of Anarcha Westcott, Betsey, and Lucy—the three identified enslaved Black girls who were subjected to Sims’ experimental surgeries without anesthesia. 

Browder also learned that Sims went on to open a medical practice that treated predominantly white women—with the use of anesthesia, a fairly new drug at the time. Sim’s experimentation on enslaved Black women without any pain relief caused “extreme agony,” as the doctor himself acknowledged in his 1884 autobiography, The Story of My Life. 

She crafted an art project featuring Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy—a kind of “ad campaign” to publicize them that included handmade t-shirts, mugs, and mouse pads in her portfolio. 

“When it was time for me to graduate, that professor wouldn’t allow me to because [my art] was considered offensive,” Browder told RNG. 

So, she dropped out of college. 

Browder was prompted to revisit her Sims drawings in 2020, after viewing the J. Marion Sims statue in Montgomery, Alabama, which depicts the man on a stone podium, overlooking the Capitol grounds.

“If Sims is ‘the father of modern gynecology,’ then what about the mothers?” Browder recalled asking herself. 

In 2021, Browder unveiled her own welded metal monument, “Mothers of Gynecology,”  in Montgomery, where Sims practiced medicine, to honor the lives of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. The red pops of color on the statue are handmade glass, and symbolize blood. 

“I immediately thought of what they went through with it being glass and the cutting,” Browder said. “Everything [on the statue] is intentional.” 

So is the statue’s location. Besides Sims practicing in Montgomery, Browder’s drive to preserve maternal history there stems from the historical importance of the Southern state capital. Montgomery is often associated with the Confederacy and the Civil Rights Movement, Browder said, but the city also had “Black infirmaries where people were able to find help and medical care.”

Learning this, she thought: “We need to teach this history to people about maternal health.” 

Browder hopes the “Mothers of Gynecology” statue will change the narrative around Black reproductive health-care in the U.S. And she hopes Montgomery will be a permanent home that history, no matter what happens in Washington, D.C. 

Since 2022, Browder has run an annual conference called “Day of Reckoning” to educate attendees on this topic. 

“When we were organizing the first conference, I called the owner of the [hospital] site where J. Marion Sims experimented…to arrange a convening” in the exact place where so much horror had transpired, she said.

When Browder visited the site, the owner told her that he was about to sell the building, which had been sitting empty. The structure was steps from where the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches took place; it’s a historical landmark. 

So Browder bought the building and the grounds where Sims had experimented on a dozen enslaved Black women. And she constructed the “Mothers of Gynecology” statue there to honor its full legacy. 

“Instead of erasing history, as [the Trump administration] is trying to do, we’re bringing it out of the basement and into the light so we can learn from it and better understand how we got here and where we’re going,” Browder said.

The fifth and final Day of Reckoning conference is scheduled for February 2026. Browder still hosts educational tours in Montgomery.

Black history remains at a standstill  

The kinds of medical malpractice Sims was guilty of have long since been prohibited. However, the disparagement of Black women’s bodily autonomy in medicine remains; it just takes different forms. 

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 1 in 5 Black women say a health-care provider or their staff has mistreated them due to their racial background. Additionally, in a series of interviews conducted at UNC Chapel Hill in 2024, researchers found that all of the 32 Black women they surveyed preferred Black OB-GYNs. Some of the women, who ranged in age from 27 to 34, worried about discrimination by non-Black providers. Some feared dying during pregnancy or childbirth. 

The history behind these fears is still on display at the Smithsonian—at least for now. The National Museum of African American History and Culture’s “Racism in Medicine and Healthcare” digital collection, unveiled in 2024, remains online. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History has Sims’ medical tools, but they are not currently on display.

It tells not just Sims’ story but also that of Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were quietly taken from her cervical cancer tumor to produce the HeLa cell line, a population of cells that can be infinitely multiplied and which are still used in cancer research today. In 2023, the Lacks family came to an undisclosed financial settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific for commercializing Lacks’ cells without her consent. 

The internet archive also documents the 40-year-long Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a clinical experiment to observe the progression of untreated syphilis in 600 African American men from Macon County, Alabama. After a whistleblower exposed the experiment in 1972, the victims’ families won $10 million in a class-action lawsuit.

Whatever happens under Trump, historian Cooper Owens believes this history can’t ever truly disappear. Total erasure is nearly impossible in the digital era. 

“I think there are ways that we can still get the information,” the medical historian said. People may “just have to be more creative and steadfast about it.”

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